Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 19, 2012 @04:00AM
from the 1-million-thread-count dept.

fangmcgee writes "Before anyone asks, no, it's not bulletproof. But that doesn't mean that the glistening yellow cape—the world's largest garment made entirely from spider silk—isn't a massive feat of engineering to be marveled. Now on public display for the first time at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the textile gets its unearthly gleam from the undyed filaments of the golden orb spider, a species of arachnid commonly found in Madagascar."

Chemistry was Alchemy, and Alchemy was a sink to put your useless monarch money extorted from the peasants. Alchemy was considered as "might be amusing once per year, and may produce gold, but the record tells us its unlikely".Chemistry was useless before it became Chemistry.

An 11-foot-long prototype of the spider-silk textile debuted at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 2009, where it broke all records for most number of visitors to a single exhibit.

Presumably, if that many people want to see it, some people might want to buy it, too. They might end up making a profit on it.

TFA does describe some of the processing of the garment, so I'd assume that it would be wearable like normal silk.

It's apparently also supposed to be very light. Is it strong too? Or is the point just to have done it because it was there? If its properties end up being worse than silk-worm silk then there isn't really much point.

Actually most spiders produce something like 5-7 different kinds of silk protein, with a separate organ for producing each. The strongest being dragline silk, which makes the structural part of the traditional bug-catching web and earns the "stronger than steel" reputation. The "glue" is actually another type of silk, which I believe is typically combined with *yet another* kind of silk to produce the actual bug-catching part of the web. Fascinating stuff, I wish I had a link to the recent TED talk on it

I'm sure it cost more than the whole shire to make.
On the BBC, Horizon "Playing God". They show a lab that has altered the DNA of goats so they produce spider web protients in their milk which can be harvested.Makes production more feasible. [ As they have 8 legs you get more mutton too:)]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mgxf [bbc.co.uk]

Kinda weird just before I read this I was just watching a show (Horizon - Playing God) where they were showing spider goats which are basicly geneticly engineered goats which make a lot of silk. I don't know if that's progress or just scary.

Aluminium was once phenomenally rare and expensive. Napoleon had a set of highly valued plates made of the stuff. Breakthroughs in manufacturing made it a cheap, common material. I suspect this will go the same way, with synthetic versions becoming a utilitarian material among others. The cape will become an amusing historical footnote.

I doubt that. What will really happen is some giant corporation with a lot of patent lawyers will buy the "intellectual property" of synthetic spider silk and it will remain expensive, nobody will do any development work with it, and it will just be an interesting high-tech material used by people that either have a lot of money or are above having to worry about IP law (but I repeat myself). So you will see it in military and aerospace equipment and that's it.

Why would we see it at all? TFA lists no practical advantage of using the material -- it was just an art project. With no advantage as a textile, it would only be useful as a luxury item anyway, and while I've no doubt that there's an eccentric millionaire or two about who might be interested in such a garment, it's no real loss for the rest of us that we're "stuck" with traditional materials.

Why would we see it at all? TFA lists no practical advantage of using the material -- it was just an art project. With no advantage as a textile, it would only be useful as a luxury item anyway, and while I've no doubt that there's an eccentric millionaire or two about who might be interested in such a garment, it's no real loss for the rest of us that we're "stuck" with traditional materials.

Spider silk is one of the strongest materials around. With an equivalent diameter, it beats out steel, carbon fiber

I doubt that. What will really happen is some giant corporation with a lot of patent lawyers will buy the "intellectual property" of synthetic spider silk and it will remain expensive

For twenty years when the patent runs out. Inventors are much better off than artists, who have to wait 95 years to use any artistic innovations (innovations like Howlin wolf's "uh how how how" which he sucessfully sued ZZ Top for).

Twenty years isn't that long (inless you're 25), 95 years is literally FOREVER. I'll be 60 this y

What are the capabilities of this silk? How is it superior to regular silk? I see no real facts just that it's made of spider silk and took a while? It would take me a while to fasion a life size bridge out of Lego - it doesn't mean it would be stronger than a real bridge.

Many different kinds of spider silk. One spider will typically produce several kinds depending on need (tensile strength, stickyness, elasticity).
But the strongest kinds will typically blow even carbon fiber out of the water when it comes to tensile strength.
Lots of difficulties to overcome still, but it is a fascinating field of research

Toughness is highly desirable in body armour. If you could afford it, a bullet proof vest made from spider silk would weigh 1/5 to 1/10 as much as a comparable Kevlar Vest. Since you can't domesticate these spiders, there's no way to make production of these fibers cost effective at this time. But there certainly is a lot of interest in it.

Being weaker than steel, it's hard to imagine it would ever be used in structural applications.

What are the capabilities of this silk? How is it superior to regular silk? I see no real facts just that it's made of spider silk and took a while? It would take me a while to fasion a life size bridge out of Lego - it doesn't mean it would be stronger than a real bridge.

?

But consider that a spider's web isn't lego so the real question is whether a bridge made from spiders silk would be stronger than a bridge made from lego? And if you had lego made from spiders silk, fashioned into a lego mindstorm robotic spider, would it make even stronger spidersilk lego blocks?

That why they have spiderman not legoman -- duuuuh. Lego doesn't have a spidey sense.